This weeks MBR is one of those which are unclassifiable . . . it’s hard-boiled, cutting edge, semi-pornographic, unapologetic, compelling and utterly fascinating . . . but don’t say we didn’t warn ya.
Ultraluminous, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25.00, 199 pages, ISBN 978-0-374-27966-0) by Katherine Faw, comes four years after her astonishing and powerful debut, Young God. If Ms. Faw took the literary world by storm with her first one, her sophomore work turns that world upside down and shakes it by the heels, demanding attent

Whenever a new book by James Lee Burke is released, I can’t wait to get my hands on it and promptly read it cover-to-cover. It’s been that way since the early 1990s, when I heard him speak on NPR about a character he’d created; a fictional Cajun detective from New Iberia, Louisiana. He was unique, this fictional detective, because he was an idealist with the quaint notion that he might speak for the neglected members of society, those poorly served by the American justice system because it can be so easily manipulated by unscrupulous people of wea

Serendipity is the ability to make fortunate discoveries by accident . . . which is what happened here at the MBR when our mailbox, (P.O. Box 2406, Colorado Springs, CO 80901) yielded up an unsolicited new publication from a small independent press in Seattle, Washington, which brought a unique new character and a superb writer to our attention.
Illegal Holdings, (Coffeetown Press, PB, $14.95, 228 pages, ISBN 978-1-60381-591-8) by Michael Niemann, features a fraud investigator from the United Nations Office of Internal Oversight Services n

Who doesn’t dream of sunny, warm days with an ample supply of cold drinks and an ocean to play in, when we’re up to our ear-muffs in icy roads, snow and sub-freezing temperatures, day, after day, after day . . . and if we can’t actually go there, we can at least escape in literature to the sun-soaked tip of Florida, down to swinging Key West, where The Cuban Affair, (Simon & Schuster, $28.99, 429 pages, ISBN 978-1-5011-0172-4) by MBR perennial favorite and master storyteller Nelson DeMille, kicks off at the Green Parrot Bar. Tha

In the world of espionage, The business of spies is lies, which makes it impossible at times, to distinguish between friend and foe . . . because all covert operations are designed to advance the interests and objectives of the spying country. Put it another way and the axiom becomes: TRUST NO ONE. They all lie all the time. And nowhere is this illustrated better than in a thrilling new spy yarn in which a trusted ally and friend becomes a deadly enemy. False Flag (Blackstone Publishing, $26.99, 320 pages, ISBN 978-1-5047-9772-6) b

Iceland sits just below the Arctic Circle, about midway between Greenland and Scandinavia. At the northernmost point of the volcanic island is the city of Siglufjördur . . . where in late November, “The darkness comes and curls around you like a furry black cat,” and it doesn’t even think about getting light again until sometime in February. Some of the people living there get depressed by the long dark night, others find comfort in it somehow, and still others—like Reykjavík lawyer Ragnar Jonasson—put their time in t